The Loving and Beloved Superego in Freud's Structural Theory1

Summarizing these observations, formulations, and implications concerning the loving and beloved superego in Freud's structural theory, we arrive at the following conclusions. There is a loving and beloved aspect of the superego. It represents the loved and admired oedipal and preoedipal parents who provide love, protection, comfort, and guidance, who embody and transmit certain ideals and moral structures more or less representative of their society, and who, even in their punishing activities, provide needed expressions of parental care, contact, and love. The maturing child will identify himself with these parental aspects. The identification will take place partly by way of imitative primary identification and partly by way of identification for purposes of mastering the oedipal crisis. The former comes under the heading of ego identification primarily, the latter under the heading of superego identification primarily. By means of this identification the child ultimately attains the position of being able to love, protect, comfort, and guide himself and his children after him, and of doing so according to relatively ego-syntonic, culture-syntonic, and impersonal sets of ideals and moral standards. In

this development much importance is permanently transferred from the mother of the world of the senses and the primary process to the great, Godlike father and the secondary process. The ego values, depends on, and loves this inner, paternal source of strength and organization. As with the id, the ego's relations with the superego are not simply antagonistic and the therapeutic task with regard to the superego is not simply to establish the ego's independence from it.